A Chat with J.W. Ocker – Midyear Macabre

Published May 19, 2026

Hello, Dear Writers, 

If you’ve followed my posts for Writing from the Peak or my personal blog, you already know I love sitting down with other authors to talk about their writing process. The six‑year‑old me who wanted to be like April O’Neil would be ecstatic to know I’m out here interviewing people like a real journalist or something. I’m this way not only with writing, but also with homeschooling and farming; I genuinely enjoy hearing what people are doing, what’s working for them, and celebrating their successes. Honestly, a conversation with me might feel like an interview for whoever I’m talking to on any given day. But, enough about me. 

For spooky readers and horror lovers all around the globe, Halloween in May has become a fun unofficial celebration to keep the eerie spirit alive while counting down to October. The tradition doesn’t have a single origin that I could find, but it has grown through horror communities, retailers, and year-round Halloween enthusiasts who simply refused to pack away the pumpkins for eleven months.

For this special Halloween‑in‑May edition of Writing from the Peak, I was thrilled to sit down (albeit virtually) with Edgar Award–winning author and explorer of the uncanny, J.W. Ocker. 

Meet J.W.

J.W. Ocker is a national-bestselling and award-winning author. His nonfiction books include The New England Grimpendium, A Season with the Witch, Cursed Objects, The United States of Cryptids, and Cult Following. His novels for kids include Death and Douglas, The Smashed Man of Dread End, The Black Slide, and Welcome to the Ghost Show. He also has a novel for adults, Twelve Nights at Rotter House.

He’s creator of OTIS: Odd Things I’ve Seen blog and Odd Things I’ve Seen: The Podcast. His work has appeared on or in CNN.com, The Atlantic, Rue Morgue, the Boston Globe, The Guardian, TIME, etc. 

Whether he’s chronicling cursed artifacts, chasing cryptids across the country, or crafting spooky adventures, Ocker approaches the strange with curiosity and craft. He’s spent years exploring the odd corners of our world so the rest of us don’t have to (but kind of want to). His work reminds us that the world is far weirder — and far more wonderful — than it first appears. Settle in and enjoy this chat with a writer who has made the macabre his map.

Q&A

Trista: What first drew you to the strange and the uncanny, and how did that fascination find its way into your writing life?

J.W. : I grew up extremely religious, and you can’t have more of an indoctrination into the strange and uncanny than through religion. And when I eventually sloughed those beliefs, I became extremely interested in the idea of belief. That you can believe one thing fervently one minute and then completely disbelieve it the next. That belief is so elastic it can encompass everything from bigfoot to germ theory. That belief is kind of the only thing that keeps us going, whether we’re looking for true love, medical breakthroughs, or ghosts. 

Trista: Was there a single childhood moment—a book, a place, a scare—that you feel set you on the path toward writing horror?

J.W. : My first foray into2 the adult side of my public library. It was divided, so you walked in and you either took a left to the kid’s section or a right to the adult’s. One day, very young, I decided to try the grownup side. Once there, though, I had no clue where to go. Fortunately, there was a sign high on one wall that read, “Young Adult.” That was me, I suddenly decided. Turns out, in this library, Young Adult encompassed science fiction, fantasy, and horror. The book covers did all the selling to me after that.

Trista: You spend so much time writing about fear. What genuinely scares you these days, and does that fear ever sneak its way into your work?

J.W. : I rarely get scared, other than existentially and practically, and never when I’m on a site. But if I’m alone in my own home for too long, I inevitably ended up freaking myself out irrationally. And not of anything in particular. Just the potential of something happening. So all the lights go on, I play old sitcoms on every TV. Basically, I need Hawkeye Pierce and Ray Romano to keep all the monsters away.

Trista: Which authors or books have most influenced your approach to horror?

J.W. : Ray Bradbury for his joy in terror; Poe for his originality; Lovecraft and Shelley for their creature creation; Asimov, Clarke, and Niven for their big concepts; O’Conner for her honesty; Keel and Streiber for their dishonesty; Barker for taking his own path, Tolkien and Lewis for going beyond mere fiction. All those Martin H. Greenberg anthologies for the handfuls of seeds thrown into the furrows of my brain.

Trista: What’s the strangest place you’ve ever found inspiration?

J.W. : I don’t usually import the strange sites and stories I find in my nonfiction into my fiction. One big exception is that I used Love Canal, New York, for my book Welcome to the Ghost Show. Love Canal is an area where a company buried toxic waste and then sold the land so that a community could be built atop it. It went bad for that community, and it eventually became a Superfund site. I visited the place for one of my nonfiction books. More than a decade later, I decided to transplant Love Canal to Maryland as the setting for Ghost Show, although I changed almost everything about the original story.

Trista: You write horror for both children and adults, which calls for very different approaches. In your view, what most clearly distinguishes the two?

J.W. : When writing horror for children, you’re usually trying to inspire wonder in the reader. Kids are on a journey of exploring this new world they find themselves in and are learning new things every hour—beautiful things, horrible things, the awesome and the awful—and they have an unending appetite for it. When writing horror for adults, you’re generally doing the opposite. It’s more about disseminating comfort. Adults are generally looking for feelings and experiences that match up to what they’ve liked in the past.

Trista: When you’re drafting, do you focus on one project at a time, or move between them?

J.W. : Typically one at a time, but only because I’m balancing (or, not balancing, more accurately) too many other things in my life.

Trista: When writing for younger readers, how do you determine what’s “just scary enough”? Are there boundaries you never cross?

J.W. : There’s no such thing as too scary for kids. Either you scare them or you don’t. Sometimes adults think we’ll give them an experience that will scar or break them. And that’s a true danger in life. But you can’t do that with literature. It’s the safest way to have any experience. But I do follow conventions around language and sex. Mostly because those things are irrelevant to kids.

Trista: What’s the most fun part of writing spooky stories for kids, and what kind of “small scare” do you personally love—quiet and creeping, or bump‑in‑the‑night?

J.W. : That fact that you can experiment and try different ideas. If you give a kid a werewolf, they’ll have a blast. Give them a brand new creation, they’ll still have a blast. It’s all the same kind of new to them versus us jaded adults. As to the kind of horror or scare I like, it’s the type that seems like it’s about to change what I believe or think about reality. Makes me feel like everything’s shaking around me. Like I’m about to experience something new and confounding and I’m not ready for it.

Trista: What advice would you give writers who want to write horror for children but aren’t sure where to start? What about advice for more seasoned writers?

J.W. : For new writers, I say just read and write. That’s your only responsibility. Read and write every day. Turn it into an obsession. Lose your family over it. Neglect bodily hygiene. The more you read and write, the better you get, the more work you finish, and once you get the knack of finishing, then you’re ready to figure out the business side of books. As to what to write for kids, use your imagination in every way you can. Don’t skimp on it. Children are great at imagination, so if an adult’s attempts are subpar, it won’t meet their standards.

For seasoned horror writers, I’d beg them to avoid subgenre. It’s really tempting to do one’s own take on vampires and zombies and witches, et al. But horror is one of the fantastical genres. You can do anything in it. So why wouldn’t we try to perform ultimate acts of creation within it. I tried to make this point once by writing an anti-haunted house novel, but it was still just a haunted house novel in the end. One of seven billion.

Trista: Can you walk us through your typical writing routine?

J.W. : The most important element of my writing routine is place. I have an office in my house surrounded by my stuff, and I love to write there. Like I’m in my own turtle shell. For my nonfiction, it all starts with travel and research. For fiction, I do a lot of thinking about the concept first—in the car, as I drift to sleep, while cleaning the bathroom—before I even start writing my first sentence.

Trista:What tools do you rely on most when writing—physical notebooks, software, voice notes, or something else?

J.W. : My laptop. Goes everywhere with me. For nonfiction, I do use a recording app for interviews and if I need notes on an experience, I’ll carry a physical notebook to help me capture the details of a scene and my in-situ thoughts on it. For fiction, it’s almost always just a laptop and my office. Every once in a while I’ll have an idea that I particularly don’t want to lose and can’t input it immediately into my manuscript for some reason, so I’ll just email it to myself on my phone. 

Trista: How do you move from a spark of an idea to a finished story?

J.W. : I can’t start a story until I know the beginning and the end. And then it’s just a process of the manual labor of connecting the two. That just comes through lots of thought, some outlining when I need to get my bearings, and a ton of writing. 

Across page‑based prose, travel writing, and podcast storytelling, how does your voice adapt—and how does writing for a spoken format specifically change your approach to language and pacing?

J.W. : With nonfiction across media, the voice stays the same because it’s, well, me. It all derives from how I talk and think, and I’m always at the center of my nonfic, so that’s going to come out whether it’s in the podcast or on 8the page. So if you’ve read one of my nonfics, you kind of know me. And if you knew me first, you’ll hear me if you read my words. It took a while for me to discover that I should just write the way I talk, but once I made that connection, my writing improved.

Trista: Have you ever written something—a scene, a detail, a line—that unsettled you enough that you had to step away from the page?

J.W. : I don’t think so. Maybe because I haven’t written a strong enough scene before, but it’s more probably because you’re just in a different mindset when you’re creating than when you’re consuming. Ultimately it’s the unknown that’s scary, but by carefully architecting it to page as the writer, it’s pretty known to you.

Trista: What, to you, makes a story linger in a reader’s mind long after the last page?

J.W. : Surprise. That’s the only way. The surprise could be in the form of a shocking scene or just an insight or idea that you’ve never come across that changes how you look at the world. 

Trista: Your Odd Things I’ve Seen podcast explores unusual places and stories. How has that influenced your fiction writing?

J.W. : That’s one of my big challenges. There’s not a single oddity that I’ve visited that I couldn’t base an entire novel around. And since I’ve been to thousands of them, I have this stockpile of “ideas.” But that’s A) not why I travel to find weirdness and B) I want my fiction to be more a product of my personal weirdness than the weirdness of the world, so I try to create fiction that I’ve never heard. Which is hard when you’re full of real-life strange stories. Or I want to write fiction inspired by parts of my internal life or past that nobody could ever know about. And that’s hard. It’s much easier to, say, visit Centralia and then write a whole story about a ghost town where an ever-burning fire consumes the ground beneath it than it is to visit Centralia and then write something weirder than Centralia.

Trista: Your Edgar Award–winning Poe Land explores Poe’s world through real‑world locations. What drew you to that approach, and what did it teach you about writing the eerie alongside the everyday?

J.W. : I’d just written two macabre travelogues that were collected essays, and I wanted to do a single-narrative travelogue but still keep it macabre. I was obsessed with Poe from a young age and I realized that not only had I been to quite a few sites connected to him, but that there were plenty more out there. Enough to fill a book. So I traveled through seven states and England to 8piece together the story of this strange genius with the physical remnants of his tragic life—from his honeymoon suite to pieces of his coffin.

Trista: As a traditionally published author, what role do you find yourself playing in the marketing of your work, and how has that shaped your experience as an author?

J.W. : I’m as much a marketer as I am a writer, unfortunately. As to how it’s shaped my experience, it’s definitely kept me humble. Like sometimes you feel more like a clown than an author (Hemingway never had to do a trend on TikTok, Austen never had to breathlessly tweet about her accomplishments), but it’s also kept me more connected to some readers. Writing books is lonely. That’s why it can be annoying to hang out with writers. They have months of pent-up conversation that they need to blow through.

Trista: Of the various ways you’ve connected your work with readers, what has proven most effective—or most surprising?

J.W. : With nonfiction, it’s by taking them along with  me on some of the journeys through podcasts and videos and social media. My newsletter is probably the most direct, thorough, and honest connection as far as that goes. I also do a lot of talks based on my nonfiction, which is a great way to connect with readers and potential readers. With fiction, I have no idea.

Trista: What are you currently working on, and what can readers look forward to next? Is there anything else you would like to say to our readers? 

J.W. : I’ve got a few books coming out in the near-future. In July, a nonfic called “Don’t Go There: A Tour of the World’s Most Sinister Spots.” In September, a first-person travelogue called “Chasing the Headless Horseman: The History, Hijinks, and Halloweens of the Real Sleepy Hollow.” And then in early 2027, I have a horror novel coming out called “Our Monster, Who Art in Heaven.”

A huge thank‑you to Mr. Ocker for taking the time to share his insights with us. You can discover more of his macabre travelogues, spooky adventures, and delightfully strange explorations on his website, OTIS (Odd Things I’ve Seen, through his social channels. 

As you return to your own creative work, don’t be afraid to embrace the wonderfully weird corners of your imagination. Remember, spooky inspiration doesn’t have to wait for October; you can find it in your favorite books, TV shows, or interviews with fellow spooky‑lovers any night of the year. It might even be lurking in the shadows just outside your window.

On behalf of Pikes Peak Writers and myself, Happy Halloween in May (if you celebrate) and a happy Tuesday, whatever you’re celebrating. Stay Spooky, friends. 

This is Trista Herring Baughman, signing off. 

Trista spends most of her time wandering through haunted history and folklore. She serves as Managing Editor of Pikes Peak Writers’ Writing from the Peak and Mississippi Folklore, a growing collection of Southern legends, ghost stories, and eerie history—with a folklore book creeping closer from the shadows. Find out more about her books here.